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art, Étienne Souriau, Being, birding, birds, birdsong, birdwatching, Crossings, death, Dr. Marquis Bey, homecoming, nature, painting, philosophy, Photography, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, tragedy, travel, Vinciane Despret, Virginia Woolf
Last year, there were vireos, grosbeaks, and warblers raining down on me with their song, from their canopy above a steep climb through the pine and aspen canyon, Ouray of the San Juan Mountains. This year a fire erased it all and was still burning as we flew out above the plumes, our pilot making a rubbernecking route as we departed. As we peered out down onto the devastated mountains, my sons held my hand as we ascended, a tradition they still abide by. And I saw the woman behind me from the corner of my eye, crossing herself.
Joseph drove me from that place I freed myself from, where he was a day laborer. He had to change his shirt before he got into the van, where I waited in my impatience to break away. I was reborn like when I collected my kids and my things and my self worth and flew away from her smoldering apartment.
Joseph apologized for keeping me waiting and asked where I was going. Though he meant which hotel, I said I wanted to see his Zambia. Minutes later we were deep in conversation in the local open market. The open aluminum and wood stalls were humming at mid day with babies sleeping in the piles of vegetables and housewares, and women walking in groups with their bags and baskets. I bought vegetables from his aunt, peanuts from a man and his son, and I can’t remember what else, but in a short time his van was full of food. I told Joseph to bring it all home to his wife, what would I do in a hotel with any of that anyway. I was down to my last $20 USD in kwacha, a week’s wages for the better off there, when Joseph said he had understood me now. The last spot he took me was under a tree where women sat on the ground with some vegetables. He told me these women had to take a bus for two hours to arrive to that patch of dirt at the end of the market, to try and sell what little they had. I said for him to pick someone and give her my last bit of money. In a few minutes, he returned to the van with a fistful of onions he threw onto the pile of food. He said the woman was very grateful, told him to tell me thank you, but she had to give me something in return.
I would understand soon that many Zambians were orphaned young, and that famine lingered. They didn’t come out and tell you this directly but a few sentences in and they were missing their mother who was a good church singer, who even while dying asked her son if he had eaten something.
During our drives around the area, Joseph became less a guide and more a confidant. Joseph had some disappointment with his wife, the unfairness at his workplace, the different ways Zambians did things. How his young parents got sick, one after the other, and died. One evening, a story came up that he said he hadn’t told anyone. He had been taken in by an aunt who was mean, making him choose between school and food. He told me more than a few times that he knew what hunger was. He said one night when he was a boy he was dreaming and a voice told him to get up and walk the road. It was 2 am but he did it anyway, along a red dirt road just like the one we were driving along. Pitch darkness except his headlights and our imaginations. He said that he walked about a hundred yards and found coins lying in the dirt. It was enough to let him eat the next day. The next morning no one believed him and he didn’t try to convince them. I said it was an angel, thinking silently to myself about his parents somewhere in a different mode of existence. He said from then on he started to believe in a god, that there was something bigger than all of us that we couldn’t make sense of. His god was loving.
Ten years ago when I had to move thousands of miles away from my native land, I found a nest that fell to the ground in the yard of the home I was about to leave, I separated the fibers and fluff of the nest and sewed them into fifty cards and sent them to everyone across the country and the world who had given me a sense of home. When I told her about the project, she told me, you had to become displaced to find your family.
Soon after my time with Joseph, I found myself on four continents within a few months, and home became that tiny piece of driftwood I once photographed, where a Common Tern perched forty miles out at sea with no hint of land anywhere on the horizon.
Adrienne said this is where the utter vastness of patterning arrives to us in 3D rendering. I said Virginia Woolf called it the hidden pattern behind the cotton wool of daily life. I droned on about miracles, and she said: yes, they occur in the crossing, when the pattern breaks through and reminds us of what we are normally cut off from. And then she sent me a poem where multiple realities are happening all at the same time, the most superficial one being a young girl declining a stranger’s invitation.
Are there unlived lives?
Joseph tells me in the same sentence that he is ready to leave the earth, and that he adopted and is raising two orphans of his own.
And yesterday, emerging from the smoke of the western Colorado fires, the Black Grosbeak and the Yellow Warbler alight upon branches within feet of each other and despite everything, sing each other into being.
Unwanted Advice: Reflections from a Self-Appointed Life Counselor 